Norman Levine Biography

Canadian short-story writer and novelist, born to Polish-Jewish parents in Ottawa, educated at Cambridge and McGill Universities. Levine settled in England, where he lived mainly in the artistic community of St Ives, Cornwall, from 1949 to 1980, when he returned to Canada. The experience of his early years is examined in Canada Made Me (1958), a work which documents his ambiguous feelings as a Canadian expatriate writer. Levine's spare, understated prose style is seen at its best in his short stories. Predominantly first-person narratives, they exhibit a keen eye for external details, but their prime concern is with the subjective experience of the outsider. His collections include One Way Ticket (1961), I Don't Want to Know Anyone Too Well (1971), Thin Ice (1979), Champagne Barn (1984), Why Do You Live So Far Away? (1984), and Something Happened Here (1991). He has also published two novels, The Angled Road (1952) and From a Seaside Town (1970; reissued in 1975 as She'll Only Drag You Down, and two volumes of verse, The Tightrope Walker (1950) and I Walk by the Harbour (1976), which largely deals with St Ives.